The warning at the entrance to the Africa Museum in Brussels is written in several languages, European and African: “Everything passes, except the past.”
How to confront that past, especially when it involves a sinister colonial legacy like Belgium's, is a long, difficult and often painful process.
In the museum founded by King Leopold II in a magnificent palace on the outskirts of the Belgian capital to exhibit works and objects - and even human remains - from that Congo that for decades was his personal property, a task of reflection, which included its closure for five years to reconfigure its collection so that it stopped being an ode to colonization and offered, as it attempts today, a critical and contextualized look at the country's colonial past.
A path that now takes another step, with the exhibition
Rethinking
Collections, based on scientific research on the origins of collections as a fundamental preliminary step - although not exclusive, those responsible warn - to undertake the necessary path of the restitution of pieces of art to their countries of origin, another of the tasks in which this museum works fully.
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In the heart of darkness.
By Mario Vargas Llosa
“It is not just about renewing our building, we must also completely innovate, especially our way of thinking,” the new general director of the Africa Museum, Bart Ouvry, explains to EL PAÍS.
“This exhibition is a new step to take up, in a critical way, the way in which we look at our own past as a museum, but also as Belgians, and as Europeans.”
The exhibition, which opens this Friday and will remain open until September 29, proposes a brief, but in-depth, tour of the reasons behind the need for restitution – also established by law in Belgium from 2022 – and the complex procedures necessary to clarify the origin of museum collections.
It is not a trivial issue: in the Africa Museum alone, the origin of 22% of the works in its collection is completely unknown, the vast majority of which (more than 40,000 pieces, 60% of the total) are made up of works brought from the Congo. before World War I.
“How did they get here?
Some did so through the private sector, or by public forces, and we know very well that some of them came to our collection through violence, theft, and manipulation.
It is important to know,” underlines Ouvry, an atypical museum director, since he was previously an ambassador in several African countries.
A professional past that also marks his experience at the head of the greatest Belgian, and probably European, reference of the Western colonial past.
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
'ReThinking Collections' exhibition at the Africa Museum in Brussels.Delmi Álvarez
The new exhibition, which according to Ouvry is also due to an exercise in “transparency” and the desire to incite dialogue about the colonial past, is opened by one of the museum's iconic pieces: the Nkisi Nkondi statue, taken as a trophy from its owner, the tribal chief Ne Kuka, one of the nine kings of the city of Boma, in 1878, during a punishment expedition in 1878 by Belgian merchant Alexandre Delcommune.
The statue is on the list of works to be returned to Kinshasa, since no one disputes the need and even moral obligation to return it to its original owners.
But not all works have such a clear origin.
The museum estimates that 25% of its collection comes from collecting expeditions organized specifically for that purpose, but it remains to be found out by what procedures they were obtained.
Another 15% are pieces made by the military, 12% by the colonial administration, 8% by the companies that operated there and another 7% from the colonial art market.
The investigation of how a work came into the hands of the museum, something that is done through the study of archives, letters and all types of available documentation - as the exhibition explains and exhibits - but also through a compilation of local oral history , among others, is important not only to clarify whether its origin is legitimate or not.
It also allows “learning the human history behind these objects,” highlights historian Agnès Lacaille, one of the three authors of the book
The Factory of Collections
that served as the basis for the exhibition.
The importance of restitution
Finding out the origin of a piece is also part of “a larger process of looking back at our colonial past, questioning ourselves about it and thinking about the consequences and long-term effects that they have had throughout the world until today,” he adds. Ohio State University professor of African American history and African studies Sarah van Beurden, another of the book's authors and curators of the exhibition.
Because, she emphasizes, “when you take an object, you take much more than an object, you take a reference of society with its past.”
Hence the importance of restitution, says Congolese Didier Gondola, professor of African History at Johns Hopkins University and third of the book's signatories.
“The objects found here are part of our history more than the Belgian one, we made those objects and we connect with them, with their identity, with our history, with our ancestors.
And they amputated all that from us,” he says.
“When talking about the so-called underdevelopment of Africa, I believe that the extraction of art objects also contributed to it, because with that extraction our cultural historical continuity was cut,” he analyzes.
An “amputation”, as Gondola calls it, that the restitution of the work can cure or, at least, alleviate, Ouvry believes: “The restitution process can contribute to increasing the national interest in that heritage of every country concerned, whether in Africa, Latin America or Asia,” he maintains.
Bart Ouvry, director of the African Museum in Brussels.Delmi Alvarez
Does this mean that all countries can learn from Belgium when it comes to somehow confronting their colonial past, as the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, proposed, in reference precisely to the museum that Ouvry now directs?
The Belgian shows off his diplomatic past when answering: “I believe that there is a specific dimension to each country and that each country, in the multiplicity of this history, must seek its answers.
There is not a single answer".
For him, the most important thing, he says, is “working with people who have been the object of colonial actions and, sometimes, victims of colonial power.
That, and not the discussion between Europeans or Westerners, is what is part of the process of restitution, exchange, and reconciliation.”
A reconciliation that this Brussels museum also actively seeks through its exhibitions.
Of what he shows, which is just 1 or 2% of his total collection, and of what he does not show: behind closed doors, waiting to finish a —another— reflection on how to present them, Ouvry has ordered to save a series of busts of colonial military figures and other statues of African warriors represented in a “very aggressive” way, something that is also a reflection of colonial prejudices.
Among the statues waiting is another of the museum's ancient jewels: the leopard man, the statue that inspired one of the characters in
Tintin in the Congo,
the album that earned its author, Hergé, accusations of being a racist and colonialist.
They are works that “show Africa in a very primitive way, when Africa is much more.
Hence the importance of contextualizing them.
They need subtitles,” says Ouvry.
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